Category Archives: Thought — caught in the act!

“Thought — caught in the act!” is a random sampling of even more random thoughts. The topics can cover almost any thing and everything from technology, startups, politics, current events, rants and other musings.

Rants and Raves, Thought -- caught in the act!, Twitter

Twitter, can you be my Zephyr?

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While I was at Carnegie Mellon, we used the Andrew system as our primary computing resource. Andrew was so ahead of its time in so many ways that till today I still long for some of the features that it offered back then. The coolest part of it was that it all worked together. I still remember using twm, or motif along with Tardis as my console, and mucking around with my X11 preferences to setup my environment just right. But the thing I miss the most about Andrew is Zephyr.

Zephyr was the first real “instant messaging and presence” system in my opinion. We used Zephyr long before there was ICQ, or AIM, or Yahoo Messenger (or Yahoo Pager as it was first known), or GoogleTalk, or Skype. But Zephyr was the coolest thing since sliced bread. Not only did it allow you to maintain a list of friends whose presence you could monitor (mk5a has logged in to orion.weh.cmu.edu for instance) but it also allowed all kinds of cool functionality that IM never really caught up with.

Let me try to describe the coolness of Zephyr from memory. If there are any MIT/CMU alums out there who remember it, I would welcome their input to correct me wherever my memory may be failing me.

Lets start with the UI. Zephyr offered both a command line interface as well as a rich UI built around it. The command line interface was brilliant for being able to send messages even when you were telnet’d in over a dialup (shudder!). The graphical UI was cool — It not only showed a list of all your “friends,” but also showed which machine they were on. Since the machine names at CMU were logical and geo-coded by the name of the cluster they were in, you had a pretty good idea of where the person was on campus. For example, weh.cmu.edu meant Wean Hall — the home of all things geeky.

When a user logged it, their name got added to the list of online users with a little + sign next to them. The + sign would fade away. When they logged out, it showed a little – sign next to their name and then removed the name from the list. You could of course also have popup notifications about when a user logged in.

The standard UI for Zephyr used message pop-ups which appeared on the top left corner of the screen. The messages would pup up in individual windows (like the “toasts” do in Windows). The user could determine if they wanted the messages to automatically close after a predetermined time interval or stay stacked until you clicked on each message. The entire message window was a giant button — so clicking or hovering over it was not a problem.

Now, I mentioned “friends” above. but like Twitter and FriendFeed today, Zephyr also allowed me to watch people who I may not know, i.e. the “follow” vs. “friend” functionality. This allowed the discovery of lots of smart (and sometime even cute ones!) people — or as they say for Twitter/Facebook now: “Facebook is for people you know, Twitter is for people you want to know better.”

Zephyr had all kinds of utilities including one called zlocate, which alowed you to find out where someone may be logged in. zmap allowed you to produce a ASCII map of a particular cluster – you could tell exactly in what corner of the room someone was sitting in by using zmap. The wall utility allowed you to blast a message out to everyone within a particular cluster (or with a wider distribution if you had the powers). It also had a ultra fun zbomb utility which allowed you to flood a user with so many zephrys that it would take them a while to close out all the windows! 🙂

But I haven’t even gotten to the coolest feature yet. The Zephyr instances. These were vitual channels that one could subscribe to to become part of an opt-in community on any topic. The best examples are the food instance and the help instance. If you subscribed to the food instance, anytime there was free food anywhere, it would be broadcast on the food instance. (At Stanford we have the Gates food maling list, but that’s not as instantaneous as the Zephyr food instance! And as a student, when it comes to free food, you want to get that message quickly, before all the food is gone!)

The Zephyr help instance is where the magic happened. If you had a question, any question all you had to do was “zwrite -i help What’s the syntax for a regular expression that finds email addresses?” or better yet “zwrite -i help What’s the phone number for Dominos” and within seconds someone out there on Andrew-land would respond. We had “wisdom of the crowds” before it was called wisdom of the crowds. Zephyr was your oracle. It knew it all. You could ask (almost) anything and get an answer. In fact if you don’t know it already, the answer to “What is the meaning of life?” is 42. I learnt that on Zephyr.

The wisdom and instant gratification of Zephyr instances surpassed anything I had ever seen. It truly worked like magic.

Today, over 16 years later (geesh, I’m getting old) we finally have Twitter. Twitter is getting closer to what we had with Zephyr. It’s still not there. but it has the makings of it. By connecting my Twitter account with my Facebook status, I’ve finally been able to recreate the “oracle” I want. For instance, I was having trouble with my wireless router. A quick post to Twitter about which new router should I buy, resulted in a series of responses on Facebook with recommendations for which router to buy. Within 10 or 20 minutes I knew what my choice would be (in case you’re wondering it’s the Linksys WRT54GL — note the L, not the newest models, but the L). Similarly when I was trying to get some data on the paid click rates for search engines, I as able to ask Twitter (though I only got responses on Facebook!)

David Pogue (@pogue), the well known tech columnist for the NY Times conducted a similar experiment recently. Twitter really has the potential to become the oracle that taps into the wisdom of the crowds. However, Twitter is not perfect. It needs LOTS of improvement. I have lots of ideas about it too (UI improvements, threading, search, media, channels, discovery, ranking, visualizations, etc.) but that’s a topic for a whole other post.

But so far, in the absence of being able to return to Andrew and Zephyr, I’ll end with…

“Twitter, can you be my Zephyr?” (I hope so!)

P.S. In case you’re wondering, I’m @manukumar on Twitter.

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Thought -- caught in the act!

On Saving vs. Consumer Spending

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I’m not an expert at economics — neither micro-economics nor macro-economics. In fact if anything, I’m slowly and steadily developing the belief that no one really understands the economy, and especially not the overpaid people who run this nation’s, and increasingly the world’s financial system.

I’ve often wondered about the disconnect that exists between the individual and the nation when it comes to economic policies and measures. As an individual, it is in your own personal self-interest to live within your means. While I was growing up (in India), credit for individuals was more or less unheard of. What was more common was “saving” — if you wanted to buy something, you would have to save up enough to make that purchase. Now I’m not arguing that that is the best approach, but a balanced approach is what I am arguing for.

By contrast, at the macro-economic level, the problem you hear the economists talking about is that “Consumer spending” is down and that has a trickle down effect on the economy — well, it does. But, should boosting consumer spending really be the way to improve the economy? Isn’t that at odds with the common sense of what is good for the individual!

In fact given the current supply chain in the US, boosting consumer spending will not necessarily stimulate the US economy as much as it will stimulate the Chinese economy. The current crisis has shown that the global economies are so tightly intertwined that that may indeed be what is necessary at a global level. Apparently, China reinvests all the excess dollars it earns into the US economy by buying up US treasuries, bonds and stocks and that is what makes money readily available in the US. If China stops buying up US assets with their surplus dollars, the US would be in even bigger credit/cashflow trouble.

Paul Kedrosky (@pkedrosky) wrote a great article titled: Watch out, world: Americans are saving again (hat tip to @timoreilly for the link). Having read this article and having recently watched I.O.U.S.A (highly recommended) I am pleased to see that Americans may be saving more again — it’s what they should have been doing in the first place. But that American’s saving again will have a adverse effect on the global economy just means that the micro and the macro are not working to reinforce each other, but against each other.

To summarize this post, in essence, I feel that there is a huge disconnect between “what is good for the individual” vs. “what is good for the United States” vs. “what is good for the global economy” and until these differences can be reconciled and the interests aligned, I fear that we will be pulling in the wrong directions.

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Thought -- caught in the act!

Counting Calories

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It is a well known fact that increased visibility or awareness of a phenomenon leads to behavior change. While you may consider this common sense there is real theory and research behind this as I learned when I took (and then helped teach) BJ Fogg‘s course in Persuasive Technology. Taemie Kim and I used this principle in our work on the Dynamic Speedometer. In that case, we hypothesized, and then showed that even an ambient awareness of the current speed limit can result in a change in driver behavior. We did this by showing the current speed limit as a visualization on the speedometer. Our studies showed that drivers drove closer to the speed limit more often when they were more aware of the the speed limit.

BJ’s class and and the principles of designing technology with the intent to change human behavior (for good) is a topic that I think about often. As a hobbyist of observing human behavior, I am fascinated by ways in which people get manipulated — sometimes consciously and sometimes sub-consciously. This happens everyday with marketing and advertising and is one of the reasons I hate being “marketed to” or “sold to” since then I know I am being manipulated. However, when this works to manipulate us in a positive direction, it can be a very compelling approach.

Yesterday, while I was in San Francisco to attend The Crunchies, a friend and I happened to walk into a Chevy’s restaurant on Van Ness Ave (an impulse decision and definitely not a pre-meditated one!). My colleague and I both noticed that their menu’s had nutritional information (calories, fat, carbs, and sodium) for every item on the menu directly below it. We were both shocked to see how most of the items on the menu also happened to be 1500 calories or over. So in one meal, you’re getting close to the entire days worth of calories! (I also noticed the limited number of options for vegetarians, unusual for most California restaurants, but then Chevy’s is a chain).

Turns out that the City of San Francisco, in its usual leading edge wisdom has required chain restaurants to post nutrition information on their menu’s:

“The law requires nutrition information – including calories, fat, carbohydrates and sodium – to be posted on menus or, for restaurants that do not have menus, on prominently displayed posters. Restaurants with menu boards would be required to list the calories per item on the board; other nutrition information could be listed on the posters.”

(Source: S.F. supes require posting of nutrition info)

Likewise, the State of California has also enacted a similar law to go into effect statewide:

“SB 1420 requires restaurant chains with 20 or more locations to post calorie information on their menus and indoor menu boards by January 1, 2011. And beginning July 1, 2009, brochures containing either calorie content information or other nutritional information, such as grams of saturated fat, grams of carbohydrates and milligrams of sodium, will be at the point of sale and drive-thrus for consumers.”

(Source: Gov. Schwarzenegger Signs Legislation Promoting Nutrition and Healthier Options)

This is a brilliant move by San Francisco and California. It really needs to be adopted all across the US. Portion sizes in the US are ridiculously large. I think that this change will have an impact on at least some fraction of the people — those who may be well-intentioned about controlling their diet, but just have a hard time doing it (like me). It is an example of increased visibility and awareness being used to encourage behavior change.

One of my favorite books on the topic of eating behavior is Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think — it is a fascinating book about how and why we are not good at controlling how much we eat. The experiments in the book are eye opening, but even though I can read and rationalize them, changing behavior is inherently hard to do. I’m glad to see these laws that are designed to encourage positive behavior change — not with a stick, but with awareness and information.

And you had to read this whole post just because I ordered a salad!

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Thought -- caught in the act!

Bailouts vs. Bankruptcies

A friend of mine just sent me a link to the following article: Former Merrill exec gets $25 million for doing nothing; buys co-op – BloggingStocks. The article talks about one particular Merrill Lynch executive who walked away with a $25M golden parachute after being on the job for a very short while.

Here’s a pretty awesome deal: Work for Merrill Lynch for a few days until it’s acquired by Bank of America Corporation (NYSE: BAC) and receive a $25 million golden parachute.

Now, I realize that the BofA takeover of Merril Lynch was a firesale more than a government bailout, but the article did make me think more about the issue of could this happen in a bailout? Since a bailout doesn’t go through the bankruptcy process, companies cannot invalidate their sometimes ridiculous employment contracts to avoid situations like this. This is one of the reasons why I dislike the bailout process as opposed to a structured bankruptcy.

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Thought -- caught in the act!

CHI Conference format

This week, I’m at the CHI conference in Montreal. This is my third CHI conference, in addition to having attended numerous other peer-reviewed/academic conferences. And I realized while sitting in some of the sessions where were lets just say not-so-interesting to put it mildly, that I would prefer a slightly (well, radically) different format for academic/peer-reviewed conferences.

Most major conferences now have multiple parallel tracks. CHI has 9 parallel tracks running concurrently with 5 different courses. So all in all, you can chose to be in one of 14 different places. The opportunity cost of missing some talks is high but unfortunately, since one doesn’t know which ones are the ones worth listening to, it’s ultimately an educated guess (some would call it more like a crap shoot, but it’s not really all that bad).

By the time a paper is presented at a conference there is nothing a person in the audience can really say or do in order to change that in any way. Regardless of how critical the comments may be, the paper/poster has already been published and is hence been condemned to be around forever. Since the paper has already gone through a peer-review process, I am willing to trust the judgment (though some would question that, but bear with me for a minute) of the reviewers who accepted the paper to have verified the methodology and the details presented in the paper. Therefore, there is no reason for me to have to sit through a half hour (20 minutes presentation and 10 minute Q&A) on a paper. Instead all I really care about is what is the motivation/topic for the paper, what was built/tested/evaluated and what the results were. 5 minutes at the most. The 5 minute presentation is sufficient to present a summary of the work. Anyone who is interested in the work, can read the paper and/or then meet with the presenter during his/her designated “discussion time” (no paper presentations should be on at the same time).

Back to the question of whether or not to trust the reviewers’ judgments — once the paper has already been accepted there is very little accountability in a public forum for the quality of the paper or the presentation. Therefore, rather than spend the time to listen to all the details, I prefer getting the executive summary and then having the opportunity to interact with the presenter in a special public Q&A session.

To that effect, I would also like to see some kind of accountability on the quality of the paper or presentation after the conference. Under the current system, while members of the audience can ask insightful questions, that interaction is not captured other than in the memories of others who were present and happened to be listening. It would be interesting to have members of the community post their critiques or questions in a public forum — similar to comments on a blog entry. Along the same lines I would also be in favor of having the paper reviewers comments and the authors rebuttal available since the real value in research is not just what actually gets published, but in the back-and-forth that happens between the community.

So here is what I would propose:
1) No paper presentation to exceed 5 minutes, maybe even 3 minutes.
2) Single (or at least fewer) track paper presentations so that one can at least get a comprehensive overview of all the papers in the conference.
3) The paper, abstract, reviews and rebuttals posted on a website, which allows others to view them and comment on them.
4) A designated “discussion session” for the paper, which is more interactive. Those who wish to question the methods or results can read the paper and then come and participate in the discussion. Those who wish to just listen and absorb are welcome as well. A scribe should be present to capture the interaction of the discussion so that it too can be archived along with the paper.

These are of course thoughts in progress, but I’d be happy to discuss them with anyone who is interested.

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